Relaxin' at Camarillo

A Radiophonic Christmas

 
Hey ho! Christmas time has passed, and though I never quite managed to put together the deathly Christmas medley I'd promised myself, I've still been enjoying a fairly constant immersion in global jazz thanks to my brand new wifi radio, a stonking contraption that allows me to tune in to more or less any radio station in the world that transmits via the internet. Purchased in a bout of yule-tide homesickness, I thought that being able to listen to leaden adaptations of Victorian novels on BBC Radio 4 would somehow satisfy the frequent sensation of cultural displacement. Lo! a single day of  one-act dramas and unfunny news quizes was all it took to rehydrate the horrible claustrophobia and writhing discomfort of youth that had made me promise myself that one day I would winkle out of that gritty, parochial hell, and flee to a newer, altogether more stupid, world. So, here I am, subjecting myself to British radio in small doses, including the unbearably arch but oddly-lovable Resonance FM, London arts radio whose Boxing Day programming more than summed it up, by offering a full reading of Christopher Smart's long and crazy poem "Jubilate Agno," and following it with two hours of bumbling hipster arseholes playing the theme-tunes to 70s children's programs (the music to the long-forgotten "Screen Test" -  one of the countless hours of shit I regularly watched after school - made me scream inside.) Stepping onto less psychologically sensitive ground, I've also been enjoying pop from Tanzania on Bongo and, of course, a wide variety of jazz stations, including those based in Argentina and Berlin, and a swing station from Switzerland.

Santa brought a couple of CDs too - Joe Pass' Portraits of Duke Ellington and Jim Hall's Jazz Guitar, a Japanese import of straight-ahead tunes in which you can really hear (deliberately, I think) the extent of Charlie Christian's influence. Novelty jazz cd of the year goes to Fellini Jazz, a jazzed-up selection of tunes from the great man's movies played by monster players - Charlie Haden (bass), Kenny Wheeler (trumpet), Chris Potter (saxes), and Paul Motian (drums).

Inspired by this performance, here is my holiday gift to you -- all the ingredients you need for your own Fellini film, in no particular order:

1. An amazing party, packed to the gills. Setting: a well-appointed apartment in Rome. Everyone dressed cocktail dresses and dinner jackets and looking far too old to be drinking so heavily. Add a couple of European models -  Anita Ekberg and Nico will do - and some misogynist intellectual types with thoughts on the novel and rebarbative glasses. Drunk and lascivious behaviour must be given a free hand. Bacchanal should be emphasized through the liberal use of close-ups of gaping mouths in the act of debauched laughter or spilling over with half-chewed food. Dress the set with a couple of wasted sailors cuddling beneath the chaise longue, and another groping some primitivist art. Fast, poppy jazz should be playing, punctuated by the occasional guitar twang that suggests the unstoppable march of rock n'roll.

2. A religious festival that takes place on what appears to be waste land. The dangerous throng of the crowd, their tears, lamentations, and intense piety, combined the dead-eyed woodenness of the saints they worship and the geriatric crustiness of the priests, are all intended to align Catholicism with voodoo. Juxtapose fevered religiosity with some obvious symbol of modernity, eg. a helicopter.

3. An empty nightclub with a fantastic band and culturally-confused decor, part Mayan, part South Sea Islands. A pair of grass-skirted African women dance to slow and unsettling bongo music. A smattering of fat pimps drink in the show while the bouncers look really hard.

4. Circus or carnival: bearded ladies, dancing horses, an alcoholic strongman, small dogs in ruffs - basically anything that suggests the tinsel and wonder of fantasy torn away to reveal seedy reality, human dereliction and fabrics that will give you a rash.

5. Depending on where you are in Fellini's career: a) Staring into the sea at Rimini, studying the train timetable and getting all hot and bothered about Mama; b) Driving around flat, fly-blown landscapes dotted by hovels, looking to fleece some poor peasant weeping over a dead donkey; c) a dream sequence featuring elephants in togas and elaborate technicolour tableaux.

6. Adventure at night. Choose from: a drunken jaunt around an abandoned castle; randomly arriving at a film star's house; your neighbour's cocktail party, passing from room to room discovering couples in spastic trysts; an attack of impotence that finally proves all those things you've been trying to deny; trawling through the squares of Rome and happening upon a poet, a visionary, and a matronly tart with forgiving breasts.

7. A missed opportunity: affluent, depressed professionals smoke heavily until eventually confessing something profound at the exact moment their partner is distracted and has stopped listening. Think "fuck it" and ravish her in the condemned latrine of a social housing project, then ride home on Beppe the window-cleaner's moped with nerry a thought for how he's supposed to get to work in the morning.

8. A theatrical performance: symbolically speaking, not that far away from the carnival, although it should feature one of your main characters actually appearing on the stage (where up-close the tinsel and wonder are revealed to be seedy, dilapidated, etc.), thereby placing them within the proscenium frame as a means of demonstrating that life is just another performance and our "characters" merely the product of an on-going attempt to shield ourselves from the scrutiny of the world (aka "the audience").

9. The hangover - the most rancid, hateful, cut-off-my-head-to-stop-my-thoughts, kill-me-now-to-spare-my-embarrassment, hangover anyone has ever had, ever. Having staggered from the detritus of the night before, brushing the confetti from your stained lapels and blinking into the Roman sun, you should probably light a fag while staring emptily into the eyes of a deformed beggar or rotting squid and wondering why the hell you feel so bleak even though you just spent a raunchy evening with that hot dancer from the tiki joint downtown.

10. Eventually, it all gets too much and it's time to roll around in the mud or gravel. We're way past talking at this point. Have a really good roll. Get lots of filth in your hair, mulch on your clothes, and leaf-mould between the teeth. Continue with hysterics for a good ten minutes while the camaraman goes off for a canole. Conclude scene by either dying or dissolving nervous breakdown into epiphanic burst of laughter than says: "Ecco - the redemptive absurdity of my life." Walk off into sunset (more probably, sunrise), followed by dog in ruff, matronly tart, and a mime on a bicycle, smiling wryly to oneself safe in the knowledge that you are destined to marry virginal heiress and have a wonderful career in public relations, while continuing to go enormous weekend benders that she can't do anything about (this is Italy, after all.) Link arms with tarts, mimes, jack russells, characters from various flashbacks (including a pissy old uncle from Ravenna with huge pantomime hands), and dance in a circle of jubilant ecstasy beneath the vast fuselage of a satisfyingly tumescent rocket.

11. FINI.

Arranging Chord Melodies - for Charlie

I haven't been playing AT ALL, though I do occasionally check in to marvel at the irreversible drainage of time that prevents me from picking up a guitar. Last time I was here, I noticed that Charlie had left me a couple of nice comments (thanks, Charlie), and a question. He's interested in chord melody and wants me to describe the approach I take to finding appropriate chords. This is very flattering as it suggests I have the first shagging clue about playing guitar, which of course I don't, but never being one to let ignorance get in the way of an opinion, I'll have a shot at answering it.

The first thing I'd say, is that chord-melody playing is not a system, or rather, I've never seen an approach to it decently systematized. Think of it instead as a grab-bag of solutions to discrete problems of arrangement. Really good players seem to have an unending supply of these piecemeal solutions that they can apply to produce really polished arrangements. That's why a lot of the books are unsatisfactory from a student's point of view: there's really no assembly-line approach.

But here we go: you don’t need to learn a ton of chords, just so long as you know how to spell them. In fact, learning loads of grips, or memorizing the contents of a chord dictionary is a big waste of time. Instead of thinking about chords as a set series of shapes, think about them as individual notes, temporarily placed together.

What's most important is that you know what all the notes are in the chord. So if you're trying to spell Bbmaj7th, you know that the 1^st is Bb, the 3^rd is D, the 5^th is F, and the 7^th is A.

When arranging a chord melody, you basically want to play the melody note on the top E or B string, and the rest underneath. It is preferable (though not essential) to have the root of the chord as the lowest note.

Remember that the chart is only a guide, and you shouldn’t be afraid to change it. A lot of charts have ridiculously fancy extensions that you should just reduce to their basic tonality. Fmaj7b5#9, for example, is just Fmaj; Gm7#11 is Gm7 (often, these big extended chords are pertinent only to piano or big band. As guitarists who can only play four or five notes at a time, we only need to know the basic tonality on top of which we’ll add the melody note.)

The most important notes in any chord are the 3^rd and the 7^th. They are the notes that tell you whether the chord is major, minor, or dominant. You can sometimes leave them out (adding a 4^th instead of a 3^rd for an ambiguous suspended sound, for example, or replacing a 7^th with a 6^th for a different kind of major sound). As long as those notes are at the core of your chord, you can build all kinds of other things around it.

If the melody note is not a note in the basic chord, then you add an extension: 9, 11, or 13. If there’s suddenly too many notes in your chord, the first note to drop is usually the 5^th (but see below).

If the melody note is not in the basic chord, and not even in the scale, then you need to make an alteration: b5, #5, b9, #9, #11th, b13th etc.

If you just can’t seem to make the melody note fit with the chord, or else it just sounds bollocks, consider playing the chord elsewhere on the neck, or using one of the many available reharmonizations -- substituting the written chord and putting another in its place (also see below).

All this means that you really need to know your fretboard. If the chart says play Bbmaj7th with the D on the E string, then you have to look around the neck and find all other notes in a usable fingering: Bb is on string 4, 8th fret; F is on string 3, 10th fret; A is on string 2, 10th fret; D is on string 1, 10th fret.

Alternatively (or even better, as well as), you can learn all the inversions on the various different string sets, especially those most useful for chord-melody, the inversions on set 1-2-3-4, set 2-3-4-5, and set  2-3-4-6. This is excellent practice, but in the end, without understanding what you're spelling, then it's still just learning a load of grips. Spelling the chords out note-by-note will not only help you find those inversions, but it will actually teach you what it is you really need to know by showing you how the chord is built. It's grammar rather than mere vocabulary. Does that help at all?

Extensions
Adding extensions to chords can leave you with too many notes in the chord. Here are some rules for dropping them:

• When playing a 9th, you can lose the 1 (unless you need if for your bass, in which case, lose the 5th).
• When playing a 13th, you can lose the 5th.
• When playing a #11th, you can lose the 5th.
• When playing a 6th, you can lose the 7th.
• When playing an 11th, you can lose either the 5ths or the 3rd.

Common Substitutions
There are lots of substitutions you can make. Here's a few for each chord:

• For the I chord: Chords I, iii, and VI can be used interchangeably; use V#9 in place of I.
• For the ii Chord: ii and IV can be used interchangeably (ie. replace Dmin7 with Fmaj7); In a ii-V progression, change the ii chord to a dominant chord (ie, Dmin7-G7 becomes D7-G7). This creates a “V of V” as D7 would be the V chord in the key of G; In a ii-V progression, the ii chord can become a min7b5 chord (ie, Dmin7-G7 becomes Dmin7b5-G7). As long as the 5th (A) is not the top note, you may flat the 5 in any of the above D minor chords.
• For the iii Chord: I, iii, and vi can be used interchangeably (eg, all Emin7s with C on top are in effect C majors).
• For the IV Chord: ii and IV can be used interchangeably.
• For the V chord: V and vii can be used interchangeably; As a diminished chord is similar to a V chord with a flat nine, play diminished whose root a one step higher than the V chord, ie play G#diminished for G7; Add colour tones and alterations such as, b5, #5, b9, #9, #11, sus., sus.b9, etc.
• For the vi Chord: I, iii and vi can be used interchangeably; vi chords may also be converted to Dominant 7th chords, adding colour tones and alterations.
• For the vii Chord: Substitute vii for V.